Still dressed as a kilted Scot, I carried the injured man into the street, and already a crowd had gathered in the belief that there had been a terrible disaster. If not as serious as that, it had been quite bad enough, and it was a miracle that there had not actually been a calamity. In one of the boxes was one of those hardy playgoers who attended our shows night after night. We had nicknamed him "Festive." The concussion had lifted him out of his seat on to the floor. He complained that the thunder had been far too realistic!
Fortunately we were able to go on with the performance, though many of us were suffering from nerves very badly. The stage hand had been speedily taken to hospital with serious injuries. It was typical of Mr. Carte's kindness that, although the man had been guilty of a very grave fault, he did not dismiss him from his service, but on his recovery made him a messenger and afterwards gave him a pension.
Early in my career as a D'Oyly Carte principal on the provincial tours, we had a fire on the stage at the Lyceum, Edinburgh. It was the week before Henry Irving was due there to give his first production of "Faust." I remember that because we had his great organ behind the stage. Our piece that night was "Ruddigore" and while I was singing one of my numbers I became aware that something was amiss. It proved to be an outbreak of fire in the sky borders over the stage, and small smouldering fragments were falling around me in a manner that was entirely unpleasant. The steps at the back also caught fire, and it was a lucky thing that, the piece being then a new one, the audience should have taken it as a bit of realism added to the ghost scene. Otherwise nothing could have avoided a panic.
I remember the stage manager shouting to me from the wings "Keep singing, keep singing." It was not easy, I can assure you, to keep on with a humorous number in circumstances like those, and with sparks dropping over one's head, but I did keep on with the song until they decided to ring down the curtain. Then I was told to run upstairs to warn the girls, whose dressing-rooms were near the flies. Now, as a young man I had made a reputation for myself as a practical joker, and one of my favourite antics was to tell this person or that, quite untruly, "You're wanted on the stage." Thus, when I rushed up to sound the real alarm, it was treated as a cry of "wolf." I banged the doors and entreated them to come out, but it was not until the smoke began to creep into the rooms that the girls knew positively that there was a fire, and promptly scurried for safety. Fortunately the outbreak was speedily subdued and the performance proceeded.
A minor incident of this kind may be worth mentioning. We were in "Erminie" at the Comedy, and at the close of one of the acts the chorus, the ladies dressed as fisher girls and holding lighted candles, were singing a concerted "Good Night." Suddenly I noticed that one of the girls who was not paying much attention to her work had let the candle ignite the mob cap she was wearing. If the flame had reached her wig—and wigs in those days were cleaned with spirit—she must have been seriously burnt. So I ran up and tore off her cap, only to be rewarded with a haughty, "How dare you!" Later, when she realised what her danger had been, her apology and thanks were profuse.
It may not, I think, be amiss if to these combustible reminiscences is added just one more story, though in a much lighter vein. It occurred in "The Sorcerer." John Wellington Wells, the "dealer in magic and spells," disappears at last into the nether regions, as it were, through the trap-door in the stage. One night the trap, having dropped a foot or so, refused to move any further, and there was I, enveloped in smoke and brimstone, poised between earth and elsewhere. So all I could do was to jump back on to the boards, make a grimace at the refractory trap-door, and go off by the ordinary exit. "Hell's full!" shouted an irreverent voice from the "gods." The joke, I know, was not a new one, for legend has it that a similar incident occurred during a performance of "Faust." Whether it did or not I do know that it occurred in that performance of "The Sorcerer."
